


Like a Bright Exhalation in the Evening, part 4

by raedbard



Series: Like a Bright Exhalation in the Evening [4]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-22
Updated: 2006-03-22
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:14:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there is gunfire, a talk with Josh, and realisation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Bright Exhalation in the Evening, part 4

**Author's Note:**

> This part is a remix of 'In the Shadow of Two Gunmen' in which someone else is shot, and is, therefore, the part where this story begins to diverge from canon.

1.

The sound of gunfire and Gina Toscano's scream ring in Toby's ears. He's higher up than the others, can see them in the middle of the crowd of bodies that heaves on the ground, making endless circles around the cars, around the President. He sees, is almost sure he sees, Ron Butterfield hold his hand up and yell something which Toby can't hear, then slam the door of the centre car from the inside. Another agent slams his fist down on the hood and the car starts up, shifting the motorcade down and out of the crowd and out of sight of the auditorium, taking the President over the bridge and back to the White House. Toby unclenches a fist he hadn't realised he was making and begins to push through the people, goes to find the others.

He can see CJ, taller than most of the rest, the amber frames of her glasses glint in the lamp light. She is struggling out of someone's arms, and as she breaks free and pushes the someone away; it's Josh. CJ puts both hands against his chest and pushes him, her face covered with her hair and her mouth open with words that Toby still isn't close enough to hear. Josh catches her hands and holds them, repeats what looks like her name over and over until she stops, until she looks at him. Toby gets caught up in the path of a series of bystanders who have all abandoned their sense of direction along with their banners and their minds. He dodges out of their way as quickly as he can but can't see through the crowd, begins pushing again. When his path clears, some minutes later, he finds Josh holding CJ, tight, with one hand in her hair.

"Are you guys okay?" Toby asks, coming up to them.

"She's in shock," Josh says.

"CJ, you okay?" Toby asks, over Josh's shoulder.

She looks up at him. Her mascara has run, creating black-brown smudges under her eyes and making her look as though she's been awake for forty hours straight.

"CJ?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine." She pushes Josh away, then pulls him back to squeeze his shoulder.

Josh says, "We're okay."

"Did the President - "

"He's in the car with Ron, Leo and Zoey too."

"Good. Okay."

"And I think I'm next," Josh says, nodding his head over Toby's shoulder towards the agent coming up to them.

"Mr Lyman?" the agent says, pushing past Toby. "Would you come with us, sir?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Toby, will you ... ?"

"Yeah," Toby nods, moving a little so that he is standing with half his body in front of CJ.

Josh is bundled into the next car left from the motorcade and Toby watches the same procedure play out: a raised hand from the agent, who gets in the car after Josh and a loud thump on the hood of the car from a second agent, signalling go. Toby stands with CJ and watches the car move off.

"Did you see Sam or Charlie?" CJ asks, after a minute.

"No ... I- I couldn't see them."

But CJ has turned from him, back towards the crowd. She yells, "Charlie!"

"Are you two okay?" he asks immediately, looking them up and down.

"We're fine, Charlie," Toby says, stretching out a hand that doesn't quite reach Charlie's arm.

He points after the motorcade, "I've got to follow the President."

Toby nods, "Take CJ too, will you?"

"Catch us up," CJ says, looking at him. Her eyes are shining, wet, and she squeezes his shoulder before following Charlie down through the crowd to the remaining cars.

He has a list in his head now, the President on down, and a tick by all but one of the names. He can't remember the last place he saw Sam, who was behind him on the steps and not among the crowd below. Toby keeps expecting a finger to poke him in the back, then pull him into a hug, but he can't see Sam anywhere, in front or behind him. He begins to retrace his steps back up, through the crowd that presses around him in a solid cloud of bodies, smoke on the wind, shouts and tears.

Closer to the steps, almost back where he started, Toby begins to shout himself.

"Sam!"

He sees Gina, standing with her back to him, facing back up towards the windows, now shattered and empty.

"Gina? Gina!"

She turns and looks at him, looking as if she doesn't remember who the hell he is.

"Have you seen Sam? Sam Seaborn?"

She shakes her head. Her mouth opens, but Toby can't hear what it is she's trying to say and leans his head closer to her.

She is saying, "No ... no. I don't know. He's n- not my responsibility."

Toby looks at her, eyes wide. Gina stands still and white, then puts her hand tight over her mouth and shakes her head, her eyes wide too and frightened. Toby nods, puts his hand over her elbow and pats there. She is still standing there, her eyes searching out the crowd, as he leaves her and moves further up the steps, towards a patch of light.

"Sam?"

He dodges another set of three distraught bystanders, one of whom slams hard into his shoulder as she passes him, almost throwing him off balance. Toby grabs the handrail hard and pulls himself further up the steps ...

"Sam!"

He pulls himself round the corner and sighs, the slight sound lost in the haze of noise and bodies, when he comes into the patch of light shining down on his Deputy, who is sitting on the paving stones, his tie loose around his neck.

"Sam, didn't you hear me calling you?"

Sam looks up at him, and smiles. Toby hardly has time to take in the spreading red stain covering Sam's stomach and bleeding through the white of his shirt through his fingers, which are pressed tight to the wound. Toby almost falls as he sinks to his knees to catch Sam before his head hits the concrete, and he scrapes the side of his leg as he goes down. He gets one arm behind Sam's neck, then the other under his shoulders. Toby pulls him up and off the ground, on to his thighs; Sam's head is heavy in his lap and his eyes close as Toby's hand comes up to his cheeks, as Toby's arm cushions the curve of his skull. Toby stops to runs his fingers through Sam's hair, peeling it back from his eyes, from his forehead, before he turns his head and screams for help.

2.

"It's a very lengthy procedure - twelve to fourteen hours. I would recommend that all of you get some rest, either here in the hospital or at home, if you can."

Toby remembers, after he has gone, every detail of the surgeon's face: grey eyes in a pink face, his lips very dry and small a gap between his front two teeth. Toby had mistrusted him instantly and wanted to say so, loudly, to someone very important; but the words wouldn't come, and he could only sit back and let the someone else ask the questions that he heard in his head a minute before CJ had said:

"Will he be okay?"

The surgeon had shuffled a little but kept his calm grey eyes on CJ, "He's in a very serious condition, but we're really doing everything we can."

Toby lets Josh take the next one: "And the President?"

"The President is in a stable condition; he should be out of surgery very soon. Really: I would strongly advise you all to go home. There's nothing you can do right now."

None of them had answered that, and though he hadn't looked up from the yellowing floor, Toby had known the expression on all their faces. He heard Donna, whose voice had been the first to break the dull silence in the room, ask, "Is there anything I - we ... is there anything I should be doing now?" and heard Josh answer, his voice so soft that Toby can hardly hear it, "Nah. We've got it all covered now." Toby blows out a long sigh, his breath hot over hands which he has not remembered to wash yet, and stands up.

"I'm going back now," he says, and walks out of the room.

He's in the washroom, letting hot water run over and over his fingers without bothering to scrub or even get some soap from the dispenser, when his breathing suddenly hitches, and he starts to cry. He figures, somewhere behind and between the sobs which he is determined to keep low and silent, that it's between this and punching his fist through the glass of the mirror in front of him; so at least this is easier to explain to CJ and Josh afterwards. He stands at the sink with both hands braced against the wall, his chin low to his chest and his eyes closed. After a minute he raises a hand and covers his face, knuckles to his cheek, aware of the shake in his fingers, and rubs the tears away, angry and embarrassed. He looks up at himself in the mirror and then down at his hands, still wet but cleaner now and little trace of the blood from Sam's chest left down in the corners of his fingernails. He holds them out above the sink, tries to keep them steady and straight but his fingers twitch, and they look pale, even next to the white enamel. Toby twists both his hands into fists and brings them down, softly, against the sink-edge. Then he turns the faucet off, and walks out.

The roads back to the White House are blocked, and he almost turns back but can't, just keeps on walking with his fingers clenched against the cold. He walks towards the lights of the West Wing and the tall white glow which the Washington Monument makes, up through the trees. He has to bargain at the gate, and again in the lobby, reaching inside his coat for his hard pass and yelling at the guards; they let him through, with reluctance; Toby thinks he'd have been the same in their place, and so walks through the stiff silence filling the lobby without turning his head and frowning back at them. The Bullpen, once he gets there, is empty; his own office, and Sam's, are dark and closed, blinds drawn. Toby sighs and stops outside his own door, his hand flat to the wood; he looks across to Sam's door, then, with a little shake of his head, pushes his own door open and goes in.

He's been in there maybe ten minutes, trying to catch his thoughts for long enough to remember what he should be taking care of, what he should be prepped for, when he hears a soft knock on the door. He turns and finds Ginger in the doorway, her hair wind-blown and her cheeks pink from the cold.

"Toby ... "

"Hey."

"I just heard," she says, shaking a head just a little.

He nods and moves towards her, "Hey, it's okay ... "

"Toby - Sam, and the President ... I - "

"I know," he says, stepping close to her and taking her in his arms. "It's okay," he whispers into her hair. Ginger brings her arms up to his shoulders, clings tight to his back, she's breathing heavily but she's not crying, just holding on to him. Toby tries not to let his fingers touch Ginger - they still seem, to him, covered in Sam's blood and he doesn't want to mark her with them. He strokes her back with his palm and the curve of his hand, and then lets her go.

"He'll be back," Toby says, his voice low and heavy in the silence still full in the Bullpen, his eyes meeting hers.

Ginger nods, "Yeah."

"You okay?"

She nods.

"Ready to go back to work?"

"Yeah," she says, and tries for a smile.

"Okay."

Ginger stays; they go back into the office together and she manages to remember things that Toby has forgotten ever existed and hands him page after page of notes. She warns him that they'll all need to see Nancy McNally and when CJ phones, maybe half an hour after Toby gets back, she confirms it.

"I'll be there in a minute," she says, and her voice is smooth, professional and in that moment, Toby envies CJ her composure.

"Are you getting questions?"

"Yeah," she says.

"Danny?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, well we can't - I mean, there's nothing we can say right now: the President's doing well; Sam's in surgery. That's it." He is amazed, in the corner of his mind which is left, still functioning, at the quality of his voice: it is as though he has absorbed her calm, and suddenly he sounds almost ordinary.

"Yeah," she says, and sighs, heavy into the phone. "Anyway: I'll be there soon, I'm on my way."

"Okay," he says. Toby listens to her breathing a moment more, then hangs up.

3.

When he comes back to the hospital, when the briefings have been done and the surgery is over, Sam's door is closed. It is the last door in a corridor of three, too bright under the strong halogen lights. He turns into the door, his palm flat against the wood, and stops. Through the glass of the window, Toby can see that Sam isn't alone in the room. Besides the nurses that go back and forth through the doors which interconnect all the rooms on the corridor, there is Josh, sitting by the bed on a low stool, with both his hands covering Sam's. Josh is stroking the back of Sam's hand, being careful of the IV line which has been sunk into the vein in the centre of it, but rubbing his thumb back and forth over Sam's knuckles. Josh is speaking. Toby can't hear the words, even as he pushes the door slightly ajar, only the high whisper of Josh's voice pushing at the edges of the silence in the room. Josh untangles one hand from Sam's, slipping his fingers out of the lock they had made, and reaches up to Sam's hair, strokes the strands off his forehead back and across in a long wave; Josh is smiling. Toby swallows, and pushes the door open.

Josh turns with the creak of the door, his face pale. He grins, almost, and lets out a long breath when he sees Toby. "Hey."

"Hey."

"I'm just ... " Josh gestures with his free hand, then pats Sam's shoulder, lightly.

"Yeah."

"Is everything ... I mean, it it all okay?"

"Yeah. CJ's done two briefings now, there'll be another one in a while."

"Is the President alright?"

"The President's fine, Josh."

Josh sighs, and his face hasn't changed; it's no lighter or darker than before. "Okay."

"Josh?"

"Yeah?"

"You wanna ... ?" Toby gestures towards the door, stilling the shake he can still feel in his fingers.

"Nah - I wanna stay."

"You should go home, Josh."

"Toby ... ?"

"Go home; get some sleep. Check on Donna."

"Donna's fine, Toby, I'd like to stay with Sam right now."

Toby takes a breath, smoothes down his tie, now loose around his neck and his first shirt button, now undone, and drifting off to the side. "I'll take it from here, Josh."

Josh looks at him for a second, laughs, 'Toby!"

"I'll take this now," Toby says, his voice low, staring at Josh.

Josh stands, looks back at Sam and lets go of his hand, then pushes the stool away gently, sending it rolling on its casters, half under Sam's bed. Toby flinches from the hiss of the wheels on the linoleum and looks away as Josh walks across to him.

"What's going on right now?" Josh asks, his voice high, almost sharp.

"I'm saying: I'll take this. I'll sit with him."

Josh stares at him a little longer, and his eyes seem grey and glassy to Toby under the halogens. Then he frowns, for a second, shakes his head. "Okay."

Toby nods, and steps aside to let Josh go through the door.

"You'll get me - you know, if anything changes, right?"

"Sure."

Josh blinks, then nods once more, "Okay."

Toby watches Josh walk away, watching every step from the other side of the window, then turns and stands, alone, in the room. The nurses are done with their rounds for now and the silence has been replaced with the low hiss of machines and the beep of monitors, and the distant hum of voices in the rooms beyond. He stands by the door and watches Sam breathing, then walks across to the stool and pulls it out from where it drifted, sits down.

Toby duplicates Josh's actions exactly: both his hands take Sam's left, and he's careful not to pull at the IV line; he slips his left hand under Sam's and links their fingers together; he raises his right and strokes it across Sam's forehead, wiping at sweat and smoothing stray hairs. He leans over the bed, his torso shadowing Sam's body under the sheets, and whispers down: "Sam, it's me ... " He leans further in and presses his mouth to Sam's temple, then whispers again, "I'm sorry."


End file.
